From loader to QA without registration and SMS

A little later I read the book by Svyatoslav Kulikov “Software Testing. Basic course”. I liked it very much – I recommend it to read.

At the same time, I signed up for testing courses, deciding that they would bring me the maximum amount of knowledge and practice in a short time.

The most useful part of the course is homework and teacher feedback. Sometimes I redid my homework several times and I am sure that this is what brought me a valuable experience. The lack of work at that time was a huge plus for me, otherwise I would not have time for anything.

I took the courses for about a month and in the middle of my studies I realized that I knew everything and that I was able to do it. It’s time to get ready for your interviews.

How I prepared my resume and applied for vacancies

To get to the interview, you need to write a good and truthful resume. After all, a resume is the first thing a potential employer sees and decides whether to invite you for an interview or not. It should reflect the real picture of your skills, relevant work experience and training.

How to write your resume correctly? The most difficult part for me is to describe in a structured way what I knew and could do, and at the same time not lie. But then I did not know how to do it, because there was no experience, so I wrote everything I could.

My previous resume is a footcloth.
My previous resume is a footcloth.

Google came to the rescue – everything is there and even more. At that time I was able to “Google” quite well, namely, to write correct queries, filter and select high-quality information. This is important for any IT specialist, whether you are a tester, programmer or business analyst. I was looking for answers to questions:

  • Which hard and soft skills to indicate and which not?

  • How long or short should your resume be?

  • Whether to indicate the experience of a loader or “enikey”?

  • Should I write that I studied testing or not?

  • Mention that I learned something other than testing?

It took me a week to study all this as part of the task “How to write a resume correctly.” I ended up with a rough draft. It took a little more time to improve and bring to mind. The final result looked like this.

Part of my first resume for a tester position.
Part of my first resume for a tester position.

There is nothing particularly complicated in the summary.

  • I researched relevant vacancies and looked at the requirements.

  • I took from the requirements what I had experience in and what I can do.

  • I put everything together and removed the repetitions.

  • This is a list of skills that I have that the market demands.

  • The more overlaps between the skills in the resume and the job, the better.

With this resume, I went to bomb HH.ru and apply for any vacancy where testing was mentioned in the title. Even those where work experience was required – after all, without even completing the courses, I considered myself experienced and omnipotent. Most of them remained unanswered, rarely offering to complete a test task. The rest of the responses, basically, received refusals of the type: “Unfortunately, at the moment we are not ready to make you this offer.”

How did I go to interviews

Now you can have interviews on Zoom or Skype, but then I walked on interviews with my feet in the offices of companies.

In a month, I was able to pass interviews in a dozen different companies: outsourcing, grocery, banks. The first 2-3 interviews were very exciting, so I failed them miserably, as I forgot a lot from the stress. It’s such a feeling when you seem to know everything, but at the interview you forgot everything at once and cannot remember. Somewhere they demanded in-depth knowledge of the database, somewhere knowledge of the English language (I did not have much with it), somewhere I got confused in elementary theory (apparently, I did not completely digest a huge amount of information in a short time).

Few people voiced the objective reasons for the refusal (respect to such people). Basically, what is unpleasant, almost no one gave feedback, they just waved off the standard phrase “We will call you back.”

But nobody called back.

But giving up is not about me.

After a series of unsuccessful interviews, I moved on to my goal: I learned from my mistakes, roughly understanding what knowledge I need to improve, and worked hard on them. The next interviews were much easier: I was less worried and more collected. It seemed to me that I definitely passed several of them successfully – and I was not mistaken.

And so I came to success

And I got an offer.

A letter in the mail about going to work.
A letter in the mail about going to work.

It was a long-awaited offer from Petrovich for an online store project. On Friday evening, July 29, the HR manager called:

– We made a positive decision. When are you ready to leave?

– August 1.

Then they sent a letter “Going to work” by mail (it is above).

Now I work in the office)
Now I work in the office)

I willingly accepted the offer, because I was waiting for it the most. I was as happy as if I had won an apartment in Sportloto, and I was jumping to the ceiling for joy.

Why was I waiting for this particular offer? I was attracted by a cozy office, a competitive salary, an annual bonus, everything according to the TC – it is important for me not to be thrown away like at the first job. I was a client of this retailer and I liked the quality of the goods and services. It’s nice to work for a company that makes the client happy. After the interview, I had a good impression and received the offer quickly. In addition, I became the first tester in the company.

Now I understand how cool it is when I built everything myself from scratch.

There were also nuances. The first time with difficulties I got to the office in the July heat along a dusty road. Then it turned out that there are still workarounds along which you can normally get there and there is a delivery I learned from the HR manager that the position of a tester is called Technical Support Specialist. Everything would be fine, but I would like to record “Tester” in labor.

Despite this, I was as pleased as an elephant. A week after I went to work in Petrovich, 2-3 more offers from large Russian banks flew in, although I interviewed them earlier than in Petrovich. Everything was delayed due to security checks, as HR managers said at the time.

I got the offer pretty quickly – 4 days after the technical interview. However, in my case, the process itself turned out to be non-standard: first I passed a technical interview, and only the next day I talked to HR. I was asked about the basic theory of testing – I answered almost all of the questions. In 2016, it was not difficult.

Now the requirements for the Juns have grown exponentially.

“Entering IT” through QA is much more difficult than before. For example, before, apart from desire, knowledge of basic testing theory and SQL queries with “joins”, nothing was required. Now I notice that experience with programming languages ​​and tools Postman, Charles, DevTools, Kibana, Figma, Git, Selenium, Docker, CLI is required. Some employers want you to test load and safety, and it’s all in the junior position.

First time… In short – in the first days I did not understand what to do. Since the direction of testing was just in its infancy, there were no documentation and processes yet. I tried to delve deeper into the product itself – in the online store of building materials, and business processes. Just at that time, Petrovich’s site was moving from Bitrix to a self-written framework, and half of the time I was also engaged in technical support of the site, so it was fun …

Since Petrovich has grown very technologically, the number of services, products and employees has increased, including QA.

I will tell you how I went from an ordinary QA to the head of the department in the next story and will cover the following topics:

  • The evolution of quality assurance over five years (from my arrival to the present)

  • What experience did I get

  • What profit did it bring to Petrovich

  • Why am I not leaving (it may seem to many that working in one company for more than five years is a long time)

Why did I write all this?

In this article, I tried to tell the ins and outs of what I had to experience, going this way from a loader to QA, albeit with the duties of technical support. I hope this article will help those who wish, but who have doubts to make this, for someone a decisive choice and step in their career and, possibly, becoming themselves in the profession. If the loader has managed to “go to IT”, then you will definitely succeed.

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